Internet

"The Internet will become like air, as Nicholas Negroponte prophesied."

"Direct democracy, made possible by the Internet, does not only relate to popular consultations, but to a new centrality of citizens in society. Current political and social organisations will be dismantled, and some will disappear. Representative democracy, by proxy, will lose its meaning. It is a cultural revolution rather than a technological one, which is why it is often misunderstood or trivialised."

"I hear there's rumors on the internets that we're going to have a draft. We're not going to have a draft, period."

"Everything you put online is your professional face. ...whatever you want that to be."

"We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now."

"DHCP was invented by a rabid gerbil on speed."

"When you go out there, the webpages you see are written by people. You're looking at a certain sub-set of the churning mass of humanity out there. So it's not that the web itself is an animal, but it's that society is this really exciting, decentralized thing, and the web, fortunately, is more or less able to echo it."

""The web setting out as something which was universal, something which anybody could use, I felt was very important," he said. "It's no good having something which will run on any platform if, in fact, there is a proprietary hold on it." Berners-Lee eventually convinced CERN to release the World Wide Web into the public domain without any patents or fees. He has since attributed the runaway success of the web to that single decision."

"Almost everything which you needed to know in your daily life was written down somewhere. And at the time, in the 1980s, it was almost certainly written down on a computer somewhere. It was very frustrating that people's effort in typing it in was not being used when, in fact, if it could only be tied together and made accessible, everything would be so much easier for everybody."

"Considering that the internet has greatly increased our access to unreliable information, and that bullshit still passes through more traditional channels such as newspapers, magazines, television, radio, and face-to-face conversations, it seems reasonable to suggest that people today are inundated with more bullshit now than ever before. The internet has ushered in the Age of Bullshit."

"Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper...there's a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet."

"The index of a search engine can be thought of as analogous to the stars in sky. What we see has never existed, as the light has traveled different distances to reach our eye. Similarly, Web pages referenced in an index were also explored at different dates and they may not exist any more."

"“Isn’t the internet wonderful?” she said. “Better than dragons any day.”"

"Caution: Do not mistake the Internet for an encyclopedia, and the search engine for a table of contents. The Internet is a sprawling databank that's about one-quarter wheat and three-quarters chaff."

"Today, you wander off the safe paths of the internet and it's like a trap. You know, you click on the wrong thing, suddenly fifty pop-ups come up, something says, hey, you've been infected with a virus, click here to fix it, which of course, if you do click on it, it does infect you with a virus, it's teeming with weird listicles and crazy things like, reason number four and how you can increase your sperm count or something, and you have to kind of constantly control yourself. You have to be on guard, it's worse than, it's a mixture of being in a bad neighborhood and a used car sales place and a casino and a infectious disease ward, all combined into one, and that is not relaxing."

"Disregard the physical distance and cherish those online relationships. Tell your friends you love them every day. Behind each of these screens is a real heart that just wants as much love as the person sitting next to you in the real world. Love your neighbor, even if you're in Louisiana and he's in New Jersey."

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true."

"On the Internet, nobody can hear you fart."

"And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a ."

"The Internet is a hole you pour your friends into for a never-ending stream of kitten photos and porn. Of course, that's quite a bargain, for some of us."

"Some complain that e-mail is impersonal — that your contact with me, during the e-mail phase of our relationship, was mediated by wires and screens and cables. Some would say that's not as good as conversing face-to-face. And yet our seeing of things is always mediated by corneas, retinas, optic nerves, and some neural machinery that takes the information from the optic nerve and propagates it into our minds. So, is looking at words on a screen so very much inferior? I think not; at least then you are conscious of the distortions. Whereas, when you see someone with your eyes, you forget about the distortions and imagine you are experiencing them purely and immediately."

"Comic Book Guy: Ack. There is no "emoticon" to express what I am feeling right now."

"(The Springfield Police Department web page is shown.)"

"The members of the did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of 'comes from everyone' and 'goes everywhere.') We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won't matter much, but the norms we set will. Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change."

"The net has provided a level playing field for criticism and comment – anyone and everyone is entitled to their opinion – and that is one of its greatest strengths."

"I yearned for that future. I wanted to live in the illusion that persuades us that true-life experience can be obtained on the Internet."

"They can't ignore us, and they can't put us down. Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn't know anything, and we would already be a fascist state."

"We must filter the Internet to win over online file sharing. But politicians don’t understand that file sharing is bad, and this is a problem for us. Therefore, we must associate file sharing with child pornography. Because that’s something the politicians understand, and something they want to filter off the Internet."

"There's a boys'-locker-room feel to the internet, where men feel they can show off for one another. A lot of the harassment is tied to this toxic masculine culture of ‘Look how cool I can be.’"

"I was attacked via nearly every facet of my online life by a loosely coordinated cyber mob. All of my social networks were flooded with a torrent of misogynist and racist slurs as well as threats of rape, violence and death. The wikipedia article about me was vandalized with similar sentiments. When I publicly shared what was happening to me, the perpetrators responded by escalating their harassment campaign and attempting to DDoS my website and hack into my online accounts. They also tried to collect and distribute my personal info including my home address and phone number. They made pornographic images in my likeness being raped by video games characters which they distributed and sent to me over and over again. Attempts were made to discredit me and my project by creating and posting false quotes or fake tweets attributed to me. There was also a flash game developed where players were invited to “beat the bitch up”. Unfortunately I still receive threats and explicit images on a semi-regular basis. In December 2012, I gave a TEDxWomen talk where I discuss in more detail what happened, and how these large scale loosely organized Cyber Mob attacks operate."

"I’m an open and vocal feminist on the internet, so I’m no stranger to some level of sexist backlash."

"There is nothing that is truly free nor democratic enough. Make no mistake, the internet did not come to save the world."

"The Internet has come to resemble an enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor, and a continuous stream of new books being added helter-skelter to the piles."

"All the free stuff that you take for granted online is only free because you are the product."

"For the record if someone did that to me I'd hitch a ride to the International Space Station straight away; of course who am I kidding, they would never let me in, I've got spiders for hands! Internet is mean!"

"Even if you do go into a coma, you can still keep posting to Usenet — everyone else does."

"When you go to the remote areas, that's where you have issues - network operators don't reach most of the communities."

"I think that the online world has actually brought books back. People are reading because they're reading the damn screen. That's more reading than people used to do."

"Surrogates and also a pretty fascinating aspect the internet. Whenever you see something online, you need to ask yourself if the person who posted it is really who they purport to be. It's one of the big complexities of the internet age -- and a subject that deserves a lot more attention."

"I have a theory that the Internet makes people stupider — and also FOX News makes people stupider. You know the Pew group did a study recently and they found out that 10 years ago, Democrats, Republicans and independents basically got their news from the same sources, probably more from CNN, for example. Then we had this polarity. ... We do have two Americas. We have the America that's living in reality. The people who understand that Obama is a centrist liberal from Hawaii who is trying to dig us out of the hole we're in. And then we have this other FOX/Matt Drudge/Rush Limbaugh reality where he is a Muslim sleeper cell, Manchurian candidate who was sent over by his Kenyan father..."

"It's very sad how in the information age you cannot get information into people's heads — as long as you write something on the internet and do not add LOL — it is true : "I'm not sure he's a Christian." — I'm not sure he's a mammal, Jay. He could be a werewolf."

"It's strange — you know, the Net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on. It's the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of. The troubadors of the fourteenth century were as nothing compared to the boundary-dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the Net. Maybe that's why there is an overwhelming male preference for it, in its early form, because that's where that was needed. But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world-soul, leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the Earth."

"This is a little known fact technological about the Internet, but the Internet is actually made of words and enthusiasm."

"A year ago I was the original Internet Dummy. [...] Then while I was on vacation, a colleague ran some telephone wire into the back of my computer, loaded a communications package, and left me a note about how to launch the operation. Readers, that note is now framed in my office. Eventually that telephone wire led to the Internet and the single most amazing, entertaining and educational experience of my career. Quite simply, the Internet has revolutionized the way I interact with the outside world, altered my work habits, and burst the bubble around my PC. It has also challenged my thinking about the future of personal communications technology. And I believe that sooner — rather than later — these changes will be mapped onto society as a whole."

"The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not."

"When you picture the tech industry, you probably think of things that don’t exist in physical space, such as the apps and internet browser on your phone. But the infrastructure required to store all this information – the physical datacentres housed in business parks and city outskirts – consume massive amounts of energy. Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually. This is a hugely environmentally destructive side to the tech industry. While it has played a big role in reaching net zero, giving us smart meters and efficient solar, it’s critical that we turn the spotlight on its environmental footprint. Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities. It is hardly news that the tech bubble’s self-glorification has obscured the uglier sides of this industry, from its proclivity for tax avoidance to its invasion of privacy and exploitation of our attention span. The industry’s environmental impact is a key issue, yet the companies that produce such models have stayed remarkably quiet about the amount of energy they consume – probably because they don’t want to spark our concern."

"In my 2008 article, I highlighted the word for ‘broadband’ in Germanic: we have breiðband in Icelandic, breëband in Afrikaans, breedband in Dutch, breitband in German and bredbånd in Danish, etc., all showing regular sound shifts from Proto-Germanic, which is reconstructible as proto-Germanic *braiđazbanđan, albeit without this implying that proto-Germanic tribes had the Internet... As such, they are intended to show that calque formation can generate an extraordinary diversity of expressions for an item of technology invented on a single occasion within a very restricted time frame and hence that such expressions do not allow any inferences to be drawn as to whether there was a single invention of an item of technology or multiple inventions (e.g. the French mania for coining their own neologisms, in this case ‘high flow rate’, by no means entails an independent invention). Nor do they tell us anything about the point of origin of this item. They also violate the rule of thumb according to which, the degree of lexical differentiation is a function of the age of the item. All that is required for this process to occur is a network and if anything, it shows that the more extensive the network linking speakers, the more diversity it generates, since the number of routes for dissemination is multiplied. Apply [the] logic on wheel etymologies to the above and you would have [Indo-Europeanist David Anthony] arguing that proto-Germanic couldn’t have broken up before broadband appeared in 2000 and the French and the Slavs each invented their own versions of broadband."

"I'll probably be the last to know, because I don't get on the internet no more."

"For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role."

"The is a global system of interconnected computer networks that is used by billions of people worldwide. In the 1960s, a team of computer scientists working for the U.S. Defense Department's (Advanced Research Projects Agency) built a communications network to connect the computers in the agency, called , the predecessor of the internet. It used a method of data transmission called "", developed by computer scientist and team member , based on prior work of other computer scientists. This technology was progressed in the 1970s by scientists and , who developed the crucial communication protocols for the internet, the (TCP) and the (IP), according to computer scientist in his book “Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science” (, 2021). For this, Kahn and Cerf are often credited as "inventors of the internet”."